The videocassette recorder (VCR) has been used as a video edit system for a long time. The VCR uses a magnetic tape of sequential access as a recording medium so that in order to play a scene soon after it has been after recorded, it is necessary to wait for the tape to rewind. This prevents quick response. The sequential access and the slow record and play speeds also prevent the quick edit of the already recorded video.
On the other hand, as video compression and decompression technologies have developed, a non-linear video edit system using a recording medium that features fast and random access, such as a magnetic disk, or hard disk drive, has recently begun to be used.
The non-linear video edit system has an edit function called a time line which provides a cut edit by quickly cutting out and combining arbitrary scenes of the video data that has previously been digitized and stored into the disk from external VCRs or video lines. In this process, the cutting out of scenes does not process copies of the video data, but acquires address information identifying the scenes, that is, the start and end position information that points to the locations of the scenes within the video data on the hard disk drive. In the play of the edit result, the non-linear video edit system refers to the scene ID information for reading the corresponding video data contents from the disk to play it. Such video data of the cut scenes, sequentially aligned on the time line, is called a package. This is a very smart and easy way to carry out a cut edit on the video data that has been previously stored into the disk.
In the cut edit, it may be necessary to change the start position (IN point) or the end position (OUT point) of a scene in the package once already created. In this case, since the scene in the package has been cut from a longer original scene, the real video data of the longer original scene is stored in the disk. Therefore, the modification, such as extension of the out edges of the scene is realized by just changing the values in the play list.
The time line play according to the play list provides easy confirmation of the transition from a cut scene to another cut scene. But when an edit point, the border or boundary between one scene and the following scene, is moved, it is impossible for the time line play to confirm the new border regions of the respective scenes before executing the edit, and requires complicated operations to do it.
Therefore, what is desired is to provide a non-linear video edit system that uses such a random accessible recorder, and can provides a useful operation when an edit point is moved.
What is further desired is to provide a non-linear video edit system that can easily provide a view of the outside margins of a cut scene in the time line edit.